72 Quotes by V. S. Pritchett

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The detective novel is the art-for-art’s-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature’s latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

Life – how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

All writers – all people – have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

It’s very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I’m being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

Detective stories are the art-for-art’s sake of yawning Philistinism.